New Perspectives in Science Education

Science education aims at preparing students to participate in the social discourse and make informed decisions. Research has shown that argumentation skills effect the gaining of scientific knowledge and the quality of evidence based decision-making positively. Austrian science teachers shall encourage students to justify their positions and argue professionally and consistently. This work deals with Austrian secondary school students’ (n=24; aged 16) argumentation about antibiotic resistance. Data was collected by audio taping eight 20-minute small group discussions in a standard biology lesson. The students prepared for the discussion in several biology lessons. They deeply studied the immune system, vaccines, public health protection, pathogens, symbiontic bacteria, antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. In addition, they practised argumentation, analysed argumentations and became acquainted with argumentation errors. In groups of three the students had 20 minutes to deal with an argumentation task in the style of von Aufschnaiter, Erduran, Osborne and Simon (2008). Every group got a statement, namely that antibiotics resistance is increasing world-wide, and four possible explanations. The students were asked to discuss the explanations. In doing so they should reason with the help of four short facts given to them as well as their expertise gained in recent biology lessons. The discussions were audio taped, transcribed and qualitatively analysed following the argumentation structure categories of Riemeier and colleagues (2012). In addition, the analysis focused on the independence, correctness and logicalness of students’ argumentations. The results show that the argumentations were mostly shallow and consisted of few elements. The students spent a lot of time with clarifiying the meaning of the given explanations and facts. Many students seemed overwhelmed by the task and did not recognise it’s purpose. They experienced difficulties in connecting knowledge as well as recognising errors in the given explanations and argued rather intuitively than rationally. The results raise the question if the prevailing school conditions, under which teachers and students have to deal with socioscientific issues, support teachers and students to enhance argumentation skills in biology lessons. Also, poorly developed language skills and a lacking conceptual understanding of the content may have negatively influenced the quality of students’ argumentation.

Keywords: socioscientific issues, decision-making, reasoning, discourse, motivation;